A popular type of cookie, designated herein as a sandwich cookie, consists of two cookie biscuts with a filling material between them. The biscuits may be thick and rounded, with confronting surfaces which are generally parallel and flat, but they may have other shapes as well, for example a simple disk form.
Methods and apparatus are already known in the art for coating one surface of a cookie biscuit with a thin layer of molten chocolate and then presenting it, coated side up, for manual application thereto of another biscuit before the chocolate layer has solidified; upon subsequent cooling, the chocolate layer serves as a solidified filler bonding the biscuits together.
One machine known in the art for providing the necessary chocolate coating is commonly designated as an enrober, and involves, in effect, floating the cookie biscuits, flat side down, across the surface of a bath of chocolate, with a wire mesh below the biscuits, after which the coated discuits are automatically lifted from the bath and tumbled over so that their coated surfaces are presented upwardly. At this point, while the chocolate is still soft, another biscuit is manually placed on the chocolate layer of each coated biscuit. Upon subsequent cooling to solidify the chocolate, the cookie sandwiches are completed.
Such manual application of the top biscuit is labor intensive and hence costly; in addition it has proved to be rather messy in that, rather quickly, the fingers of the workers and the equipment around the cookie-making line become spattered and coated with the liquid chocolate, requiring frequent clean-up procedures. The time and labor involved in such clean-up add further expense to the production procedure.
It has therefore been desirable to provide a method and apparatus for manufacturing sandwich cookies commercially at high speeds, at reduced expense, and with a less messy procedure. Heretofore, so far as is known to applicant, this has not been achieved in the case of sandwich cookies utilizing a chocolate filler. This is primarily because, to achieve an appropriate bond between the biscuits, the chocolate must be molten, or at least soft, when the biscuits are placed together; if it is not, it does not have the cementing properties necessary to achieve the desired bonding. On the other hand, it has been found impractical, or at least messy and expensive, to move along an automatic production line biscuits having molten chocolate layers on them, and to apply the other biscuits automatically to the molten chocolate layers "on the fly", that is, while both the coated and uncoated biscuits are moving along the production line.
Furthermore, while it might be thought that one could coat a biscuit with chocolate, solidify the chocolate to provide a hard coating, and then momentarily soften the coating just before the other biscuit is to be applied to it to achieve the desired bonding, in the case of a chocolate filling this is particularly difficult, and thus far has not been found practical. This is primarily for the reason that, if the chocolate is softened by heating it, then upon resolidifying it loses some of its desirable properties; for example, it is likely to experience some whitening, as well as some degradation in consistency, such as not rehardening for example. The danger of excessive extrusion or flow of some of the chocolate layer outwardly onto the sides of the biscuits also exists when attempting to use such apparatus and procedures.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide new and useful method and apparatus for the production of sandwich-type cookies, especially of the type in which the filler material is chocolate, as well as a new and useful cookie made by such method and apparatus.
Another object is to provide such method and apparatus which are efficient and reliable.
A further object is to provide such method and apparatus which are economical to employ.
It is also an object to provide such method and apparatus which do not result in the undesired dispersion of filler material, especially chocolate, onto the apparatus or operating personnel.
A still further object is to provide a novel sandwich cookie.